Digital Society Project data

Mechkova, Valeriya, Daniel Pemstein, Brigitte Seim, and Steven Wilson. 2020. “DSP [Country-Year] Dataset v2” Digital Society Project (DSP).

1. Correlations

We see strong positive correlations between government dissemination of false information and government social media monitoring, Internet filtering, and shouting. Average people’s use of social media to organize offline action is positively correlated with elites’ use of social media to organize offline action, internet shutdown, and - online media fractionalization. Strong negative relationships between online media fractionalization and elites’ use of social media to organize offline action.

Ploting Digital Society Project data

2. Government dissemination of false information domestically. Russia is the only country with 0 score (extremely often). In Hungary, Egypt, and Hong Kong frequency is often. In some established democracies like UK, USA, and Italy governments sometimes also spread false info.

3. Government social media shutdown in practice. Practiced mostly in Egypt, Russia, less in Indonesia. Interestingly, minor differences between the UK and Hong Kong. Almost never in Hungary (score even higher than in Germany and France).

4. Government internet filtering in practice : the highest value of the index, the lowest government censors political information. In democracies government almost never censor. Sometimes filter in Brazil, Kenia, Malaysia, and South Africa. Often filter in Egypt, Russia, Hong Kong. Compared to Poland, censorship in Hungary is harsher (even harsher than in Mexico)

5. Internet filtering and shutdown in practice

6. Government social media monitoring and average people use social media to organize offline political action of any kind.

7. Average people’s use of social media to organize offline action is positively correlated with internet shutdown.

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8. Online media fractionalization (the higher score - the more similar pictures present major domestic online media). We see that the most fractionalized online media are in Hungary, followed by Spain and Germany. Small differences in representation are observed in Mexico, followed by Estonia, Egypt, and Poland. The relatively small difference between Russia and Sweden. probably not related to the regime?

9. Polarization of society - the higher score indicates the lower polarization on major political issues. 0 score (USA, Poland, Hungary, Brazil, France, Indonesia, Mexico) - serious differences on political issues, very polarized societies.

QofG Cross-sectional data, International Telecommunications Union data

Teorell, Jan, Aksel Sundström, Sören Holmberg, Bo Rothstein, Natalia Alvarado Pachon & Cem Mert Dalli. 2021. The Quality of Government Standard Dataset,version Jan21. University of Gothenburg: The Quality of Government Institute, doi:10.18157/qogstdjan21

Hong Kong is absent in the analysis because it’s not present in QofG Standart data

10. Correlation between: strong positive correlation between vdem_mecorrpt, vdem_libdem, dr_eg (Economic globalization), mad_gdppc (real GDP), and all International Telecommunications data (lower with E-Government Index). vdem_corr - Political corruption index negatively correlates with all indicators. Less significant relationships between vdem_partip - Participatory component index and online media data.

11. Index assessed each country’s national website.

12. Fixed-broadband Internet subscriptions/100 pop by country. The highert numbers in Western Europe, followed by Eastern Europe and developing economies. The lowest in African countries.

13. Mobile-cellular telephone subscriptions is higher in Russia, Sounth Africa and Estonia. Lower than average in Spain, France, Hungary, Brazil, UK and African countries.

14. Internet users. % pop. Quite similar trend as for Fixed-broadband Internet subscriptions, but considerably more users in Nigeria, Indonesia, Kenia, South Africa.

15. Telecommunication Infrastructure Index measures internet users,mobile subscribers,main fixed telephone lines and etc. Index’s values are the lowest in Kenia, Nigeria and Egypt. In general the same trend as for Fixed-broadband Internet subscriptions.

16. Positive relationships between econ. development and internet users and negative one with Political Curruption Index.

17.Positive relationship between the Human Capital Index and number of Internet subscriptions/100 pop.

18. In general positive correlation between the Liberal Democracy Index and the number of mobile subscriptions/100 pop. Several outliners as Russia and Malaysia where regimes are undemocratic but a lot of people use mobile phones.

Merged data

19. The higher score of liberal democracy - the fewer governments censor and block political information on the Internet.

20. Countries with lower scores of corruption perception are higher polarized on political issues. Russia is a country with strong perceptions of corruption but very low polarization in society. We also see that in highly polarized societies average use of social media to organize political actions is higher (here also Russia seems to be an outliner).

21. Higher number of arrests in undemocratic regimes.

22. Lower scores on y scale - more often government spreads false info.